Page 7 of Dark ’N’ Deadly

She stood and began pacing the small room. How will I get him out of this? “This isn’t Alabama. Not everyone has a gun here, and the fact that you were driving a truck without a driver license, registration, or insurance and with a gun in a hidden compartment is bad. Gun laws are very strict in the northeast, and you just turned eighteen. You won’t be cut the same slack afforded a minor.”

“It’s bad, isn’t it?” Jesse’s countenance was grim.

Tess pressed a hand to her brow. Yes, it’s bad. She didn’t dare voice the extent of her worry. Part of her couldn’t believe their stepfather had put Jesse in such a precarious and terrible predicament. Then again, she wouldn’t put anything past him. The selfish sonofabitch. The only question was what the heck was behind all this?

Seeing her brother’s eyes begin to glisten again nearly reopened her own floodgates, but she refused to give up. She sat in the chair opposite him. “I need to get you an attorney, but I don’t have a lot of money.” Andi paid her as well as possible, but between rent and her online tuition, there wasn’t much left for extras. There was only one thing left to do. She’d take the tuition set aside for next semester and however many semesters it took to get Jesse a competent lawyer. “Somehow, I’ll find the money. If I can’t, we’ll settle for a public defender.”

He shifted and scrunched up his face in the same way he’d done as a little boy just before saying something she wouldn’t like.

“Jesse?” she said in an admonishing tone, knowing he was keeping something from her. Something important. “What did you do?”

“I, uh.” His grimace intensified. “I mighta told the agent I didn’t want a lawyer and that I’d tell him everything as soon as you got here.”

“No!” She smacked her hands on the table, making him flinch. “You can’t tell him anything. We need to talk to a lawyer first, then we’ll figure out what to say to the agent.” That agent being Eric, of course.

They stared at each other across the table, much as they’d done as kids. A Tessie-Jesse standoff.

“No, Tessie. No lawyers.” Soft, gentle eyes she remembered from their childhood were now hard, his jaw set in stone. He was no longer the little boy she’d once known.

She pressed her lips together, choking down the warning she wanted to scream at the top of her lungs: Please don’t grow up just yet.

Her brother was caught somewhere between a boy and a man, and she was scared to death for him.

“I want a deal,” he continued, “and I want it fast, before he finds out. Things have changed. They’ve gotten worse. He thinks anyone who gets grabbed by the ATF or the IRS or the FBI is too stupid to live and gets labeled a snitch. If word got out that I was arrested by the ATF, he’ll kill me. I swear he’ll do it. You know as well as I do that our family isn’t like other families.”

“Of course, I know that.” It sounded as if things had spiraled way out of control, and her brother was caught in a deadly vortex.

“I’ll take care of this, Jesse. We’re in it together, and I won’t leave you again. I promise.” It was a promise she would never break.

“I believe you.” He covered her hand with his. “It’ll be okay. Besides, for a fed, this guy’s not a total douche. He even got my leg cleaned up.”

“Wait, what?” Pushing from the table, she peered under it to see white gauze wrapped around his ankle. “What happened to your leg? Are you okay?”

“Yeah. A dog bit me—a K-9 dog.” To her surprise, Jesse grinned. “It’s the coolest dog ever. You should see it.” His grin widened. “It did whatever it was told, and I don’t even know what language that fed was talkin’ to him.”

Oh, right. While she’d forgotten Eric was a K-9 officer, that was probably the only thing she’d forgotten. Everything else about the man—what he looked like, the sound of his voice, the way he made her heart race—was tattooed on her memory for all eternity.

It doesn’t matter. Anything she could possibly want for herself was totally eclipsed by what her brother needed. Nothing else mattered. Nothing.

“We can’t trust him.” She leaned in across the table. “He’s a federal agent. An ATF agent. You can’t tell him about the family. If he asks something that you’re not sure about answering, look at me. We’ll communicate like we did back home.”

He nodded. “Okay.”

She twisted her hands in her lap, hating the idea of lying to Eric, but this was too important to take any chances. If they didn’t at least withhold certain information and come up with a plausible story, there’d be zero chance of preventing Jesse from winding up with a firearms felony on his record, something that would haunt him for the rest of his life. And those drums? Whatever was in them couldn’t be good.

Why send Jesse, of all people, to deliver them? None of this made any sense, which worried her even more.

Voices came from the other side of the door, one of which she recognized.

Eric.

His deep voice made her breath catch. A sense of foreboding filled her mind, while at the same time, anticipation shot up her spine.

“We’ll play this by ear,” she whispered. “Okay?” He nodded, and she stared at the door that was now cracking open.

“Tess?” came her brother’s worried voice. “What’s wrong with you?”

Her heart fluttered, and when the door opened, she held her breath.